Choose to Feel Good About Yourself

You know, I was thinking today about the San Diego Padres. They’re 7 and 2 now and it’s interesting to hear the analysts. At one point they were 1 and 2, and they were down by 3 runs to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the eighth inning, and somehow they rallied and won the game and made 2-2 and split with a team that’s supposed to win the championship in our league outright, and suddenly the team started to belief in itself. And they started saying, “Well, we really hang together,” and all that kind of thing. And suddenly they’ve just pulled off all these wins in a row. So what would have happened if they had lost and they had been 1 and 3? Would they have been able to hold their heads up?

So often how you feel about yourself is completely a choice. One of our problems is that how we feel about ourselves is usually related to our performance. So if we don’t have such a good day, or if we lose an account, or think we did something wrong, all that kind of thing—what we have to recognize is that performance will go up and down. People’s opinion of us will go up and down. You have to believe in yourself. You have to choose that we’re doing good things and you’re doing good things. So let’s just see what happens to the Padres – if they keep it up, or if they suddenly lose a couple of games and start staying, “Maybe we’re not as good as we thought,” and all of a sudden their attitude changes. Life is really a series of choices. Norman Vincent Peale used to say, “When you wake up in the morning, you have two choices in life: You can feel good about yourself or you can feel lousy. Why would you choose the latter one?” So today, make the choice to feel good about yourself!